$350 billion P&G's CEO is excited by his data lake, but...
"We have supply chain platforms that can run autonomously reacting to retail demand signals."
Data
New platforms are powering a “once-in-a-generation” shift for Procter & Gamble (P&G), says its CEO, with “petabytes of data” uploaded to the cloud helping power “autonomous” and responsive supply chains.
Data architecture was the unlikely centre of discussion for the $350 billion market cap consumer goods manufacturer during a Q2 earnings call – that also, of course, touched on diapers, toothpaste, and soap.
P&G CEO Shailesh Jejurikar said late Thursday that the firm (which sells household brands like Ariel, Tide, Fairy, Pampers, and Oral-B) has “built a structured data lake stocked with petabytes of relevant data.
Jejurikar added: “We have built data platforms, AI capabilities, programmatic shelf tools and media creation and evaluation systems…”
“Heavy investment”
P&G CEO Jejurikar (who was promoted from COO to President and CEO this month) told analysts that the company had committed "heavy investment" and significant cultural changes to deliver a "consistent ERP platform", data lake and data governance structure over the last decade.
(The company, a longstanding SAP and Microsoft shop, appears to have migrated to S4/HANA - with one manager noting in a case study with a third-party supplier that “the cutover [needed] to be absolutely flawless as a week of our global operation is worth $1.5 billion.”)
The CEO warned that despite new platform adoption, delivering on the promise of this “requires internal cultural change for people to work the data and systems in a certain way is not a change that you can just do overnight. Even if you have the technology solution…”
(That’s the view at Goldman Sachs too, where CEO David Solomon, speaking about the use of AI to drive process change, noted this week that it “takes an enormous amount of work to bring people along...”)
See also: Netflix uses 4 open source pillars to manage massive data flows
The data overhaul will support P&G's "Supply Chain 3.0" project targeting $1.5 billion in pre-tax savings per year through digitisation and automation.
That, he said, is starting to bear real fruit: "We have supply chain platforms that can run autonomously reacting to retail demand signals, consumer innovation needs, or productivity opportunities faster than ever before.”
The “next step”, added P&G’s CEO, is to “connect the dots…. to integrate the pieces from identifying consumer friction point to product idea, to product design, to supply, to creative concept, to purchase transaction, to usage in home, to post-use evaluation. We will close the loop!”
In a Microsoft case study from December 2025, P&G’s Senior IT Director Greg Hormann said that the company was also pulling in extensive IoT data from the company’s plants, enabling “near real-time” ML models.
“The company uses Azure Arc to build and orchestrate Kubernetes-based models in Azure in the cloud and deploy them at the edge on equipment in P&G manufacturing facilities” it said – a Kubernetes-based MQTT broker enables the flow of data to the cloud. (IT VP Kurt Lermann added in the same report: “P&G data scientists use that data to build AI models, look into history, detect trends, and drive predictive or prescriptive models.”)
Jobs slashed but data hiring
The data lake and Supply Chain 3.0 projects are part of a wider efficiency drive for the company, which reported $11.4 billion in gross profit in Q2, alongside a 7,000 person staff reduction first announced in 2025.
Despite the cuts, the company is hiring a wave of data engineering and AI workers, including a Data Engineering and Visualisation Leader and an Azure-focussed Data Platform Engineer at its India office in Hyderabad.
The company does not break out IT spending as a separate figure, but a report from GlobalData estimated its 2024 budget as $1.1 billion.
Wanted: A Cloud VP with Finops chops
According to a job advert for a new VP of Cloud, its cloud services and business intelligence team has 120 people and a budget of $200 million.
The company wants someone with “experience as a practitioner and leader in multi-cloud environment (ideally Azure and GCP); ability to articulate a multi-cloud decision tree and data affinity consideration” and who is a “master of FinOps at infrastructure, application, and platform layers.”
CFO Andre Schulten added this week: “The way we're approaching the organization design, the way we're integrating technology into the way we work and the way we want to decrease functional barriers, we think that's a powerful path forward to continue to drive organizational effectiveness and, honestly, free up a ton of capacity of our teams from internal work to focus on what really matters, which is the consumer innovation and execution.”